[Plugin: Business Directory Plugin] Filter by Location – Can I help?

Hi nathmie,

That’s a very kind offer. We already have this in process, so I think we’ll be alright on it. I’m porting the design from another existing plugin (AWPCP) so we have most of the bugs worked out of that already.

Expect to see it by end of the summer, roughly. Maybe sooner if things go well. Maybe later if they don’t. ??

I am in the southern hemisphere, what does end of summer mean for you? August/September/Oct?

Greetings,
I would be very interested in this and willing to help debug, test and contribute – love the plugin, but the limitations in search by form field like City is frustrating. If we add the city as a Tag and another Tag it will not display the results. Use one or the other, it displays.
Please let me know how we can help.

capeproducer, I have read your sentence a few times. I am not sure what you are saying.

I would like to have a Category say FOOD with sub-cats, say A and another cat B.

On coming to the Directory page, ALL I want to have is the ability for uses to filter by LOCATION.

e.g. select State/Province which then filters down to Cities/Towns (ALL option ofcourse) which then filters down to Suburbs

THEN he/she select Cat A or Cat B and gets what they looking for.

does anybody have code that I can try? I am going to start googling this all, if I get it write I will share it.

In terms of the drilling down effect, the reason for that is I can re-use the Location hierarchy if i want to add more sections later on.

End of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere is roughly mid-September. Sorry for any confusion.

Okay, so I see you guys are working on a location filter. NOW tell me this, if I begin to build my directory using your plugin, how do I AVOID re-work once your location feature is working?

i.e. My country is broken up into provinces then Towns/Cities etc.

If I have a business A under say FOOD, should I have a category for towns and another one for provinces.

I want to start building my directory without the risk of re-work once your plugin comes with a location feature.

Please can you advise soonest what is the best way to move forward?

You can temporarily list your items in multiple categories–one for subject (like food) and another for location (a city). The trick is to list it in both categories (you can do that in the admin edit listing section, just assign a second category to a listing).

I won’t lie–this can get cumbersome, fast. That’s why we’re building the region module. But once you have regions, you can delete your location categories and just use the region module and it shouldn’t require additional rework.

Okay, so for now I can build a directory without worrying about the location and then once your regional module is built I will be able to assign listings to a city/region or whatever?

I see you have a google map module, how does this fit in with the regional module, as surely that module needs a location textbox to get the address from?

It does. Google Maps can pull the address from a single field or multiple fields. We support any mix of these fields:

Address
City
State
Country

You can provide as few as one, or as many as all, and Google Maps will use that info to provide a marker. For regions, I would suggest splitting things up into 3 separate fields: city/state/address. That gives you better search options later without having to rework your data.

Thanks again. I am using your CSV and to confirm this is what I am going to do, please let me know if it makes sense.

The plugin is looking better and works with php 5.4.4 nice work. I bought wp local plus and needless to say I am trying to get a refund!

1. I intend buying Google Module, Regional Module and properly the ratings one.

2. I have businesses/organisations in South Africa that I would like to list, thus the location of a place is different to states and everywhere else

3. So, I was thinking of preparing the fields as follows in anticipation of your regional module and Google maps module, before buying I want to have assurance things will work

FIELDS
1. Address e.g. 1 Sunny Street
2. Suburb/Area
3. City/Town – Cape Town
4. Province – I think this would be similar to your State
5. Country – South Africa

So, if I made the effort to prepare my CSV files with that format with respect to the locations, would that bode well for your Google maps and regional control modules?

O, and if one buys one module now, would there be a discount for buying another module later?

I ask because you have two modules discount combos, but I do not require anything of those others as I am running a free directory, also because I am buying in a dramatically weaker currency :). 1 dollar for me equals 8 South Africa Rands ??

Your field config looks fine.

As to module discounts, once I release the ratings and regions, I will update the combo pack to have all modules at a discounted price for single and multi site use.

I will be buying the Google Map Module soon, just waiting for my refund.

A final concern before I resolve this…

The wording on your website reads “This module allows your businesses that list in Business Directory to have a Google Map for their address. You can map the address fields from any field you’ve added in the Manage Form Fields section”

From what we have been discussing your Google module can concatenate a number of fields to create a ADDRESS that it will use to generate the map, does this still stand as the wording above implies reading from a single field?

No, my original statement stands. You can use ANY set of fields that relate to your address data from your list of Manage Form Fields. That means you can have an address in a single field OR you can break it up into as many as 4 or 5 different fields for use by Google Maps.

I have just bought the plugin.

Question 1

You said on forum posts it could map to 4/5 fields. I have the following:
address
suburb-area
town-city
province
country
postal-code

Your plugin does not have suburb/area included how do I overcome this?

Should I just merge Address with suburb-area? I can do this quite easily as I am importing from csv files if u don’t have a solution.

Nevermind, I changed my CSV to match your fields.